No strings attached
These stylish kitchen aprons drape like dresses
C HEF-turned-food stylist Mariana Velasquez had one minor gripe about cooking in highend restaurants: She couldn’t express herself through fashion. “You show up to work, and you change into chef ’s whites,” she says of her roles at dining destinations such as Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, Calif. “You sort of lose part of your identity by having a uniform.”
So when Velasquez got out of the kitchen and into the studio — now living in NYC, she’s worked on more than 20 cookbooks and styled the likes of Michelle Obama — she vowed to dress with “passion,” right down to her smocks.
“I still had to wear aprons to protect my clothes when I was working,” she says, “and I couldn’t find any that looked good and complemented what I was wearing.”
Her solution was to create an elegant apron that didn’t have strings at the neck or waist — “I felt like I was adjusting ties all day,” she says — mod- eled after one of her favorite tops. Dubbed Buenlimón — for (Spanish for “add a good squeeze of lemon”), one of Velasquez’s cooking catchphrases — the line of aprons is meant to add chic flourish to any hostess outfit. The cross-back garment pulls on overhead and flows “like a gown,” Velasquez says. It’s feminine and minimalist, with just one pocket meant to hold a cellphone or small kitchen tool. (She says her florist friends stash shears in it.) Buenlimón Aprons are made from durable linens and cottons sourced from all over the world, from Italy to Nashville, Tenn., not to mention the Brooklyn Flea, and they’re sewn in Velasquez’s native Bogotá, Colombia. Each finished apron comes with a note about the origins of the material. “Every fabric has a story,” she says.